Isn't that already happening and has happened? This news is a decade late. Last decade we could've said "in the next few years"

That kind of spending is included under "retirement spending" in the article. They estimate that substantial amounts go to heirs after that, but mostly among the affluent.

Bold assessment.

> siphoning money out of baby boomers (medical care, retirement homes, luxury cruises)

This has been happening for a while already.

Not all households are as dysfunctional as the ones you described.

And there's a reason why trust and wealth planning has becoming increasingly common.

And while I am optimistic about AI's capabilities and am by no means an AI Luddite, assuming AI will take all jobs in the near future is ludicrous.

> the end result is neo-feudalism where familial dynasties call all the shots

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that this is mostly where we are already.

Agree that before the boomers can pass money to their children, our corporate overlords will find a way to hoover that money into their vaults.

Don't think AI will take everyone's job and is actually orthogonal to this entire issue.

not wrong

I had the same fears but even the boomers sitting on million dollar homes are being called “cash poor”.

You still need an income. You can only refinance so much, and then you’re paying off interest.

If your home 10x’s in value so does your property tax. Some people are paying $1500/mo. in property tax. They need a job just to cover it.

You can’t sell the house and cash out because you need that cash to buy the next house without having a huge monthly payment.

It’s not enough to just own assets. They have to be capitalized upon in some way - having a renter, building a farm, storage, or other business with it, and so-on.

But nobody is really doing that. I think boomers thought they would get rich off the real estate and it’s not really happening. All it did was make prices out of reach for the average person.

Super wealthy are buying homes at inflated prices which is interesting and surprising but they’re largely not boomers.

Dynasties calling shots maybe, probably. But what’s new?

You’re right but they do at least say this:

> by our estimate the amount spent will be smaller still at $8 trillion,* because most households receiving an inheritance are already affluent and likely to save or invest much of what they receive

In many places you couldn't even buy "starter houses" like they had anymore. They wouldn't meet modern building codes. When people do manage to buy a house, it will likely be a nicer one.

It is a very good read. And my only difference in option is that I think Visa of all places would be very knowledgeable about spending and where it all goes.

They have an absolutely vast amount of information about how money flows in the economy, and an interest in finding out where it will flow in the future, and when.

> That might be true, but (for example) when this youngest-of-them Boomer bought his first house, housing was much more affordable.

I think my fellow millennials are overlooking something in our complaints about housing prices, which is that the positional status of neighborhoods doesn't stay constant. There's a good chance that the neighborhood you fondly remember growing up in was much less desirable in relative terms than it is today.

My wife and I, for example, bought a house 10 years ago. In that time, the value has easily doubled, growing far faster than wages or inflation. But it's also a completely different product today. 10 years ago, we were young parents willing to make a lot of compromises to get a house on the water. Pre-COVID, the commute was 1:15 minutes each way, 5 days a week. The house next door was a tear-down with a tree growing in the living room. The other houses on the street were small cottages from the 1920s. Today, half of them have been torn down, rebuilt, and filled with more affluent neighbors.

If my kids grow up and say, "I have a professional job, why can't I afford a house like you guys did?" A big part of the answer is: we couldn't have afforded to live in their neighborhood at your age. We bought our house in a completely different neighborhood.

"my parents are blowing my inheritance". Really? It is their money, not yours. I think you mean, "my parents are spending down their savings."

This is an article about how the 99% will spend all their money and their children will not inherit money. The 1% will not spend all their money. They are not who the article is about.

The article says the exact opposite.

Wealth isn't with boomers: it is with rich boomers, pointing the high mortgage and debt that a lot of boomers have.

And they explain that the wealth is going to stay and be kept by these rich families (which will invest and not spend).

Read about revolutionaries, they really don’t care who they eat. Be prepared to be involuntarily labeled a boomer

> >plant to do a Skip gen trip?

> I have no earthy idea what this could mean but they just casually drop it in there

It's defined in the paragraph above the image you misquoted:

> Skip-generation trips, where grandparents travel with grandchildren without their parents, are a clear example of how the wealth transfer is not just about money. These trips turn wealth into time together, shared memories and a way to pass down values across generations.

I've seen a lot of people do can put refinances instead of paying the house off. I recall one friend looked at the deed on the new house he bought (10 years ago) for 250k. The previous sale was for 90k, but we could see every refinance over the years, they owed 235k when it was sold. Probably lived a nice life in between with nice vacations but no savings.

One reason is older homes need repairs. Furnaces, roofs, windows, etc. What to do when faced with $20k in repairs? Borrow it.

Maybe they all got houses when the monthly payments were affordable.

> What is shocking to me is how can so many boomers still have a mortgage?

If you have a low-interest mortgage then it doesn't make financial sense to pay it off any faster than you have to. I know many people that carry a mortgage they could easily pay down but choose not to purely on financial optimization grounds.

My parents are not boomers (they're Gen X), but kept their marginal mortgage because the capital they would have used to fully pay off the mortgage could be better deployed in a mixture of investments.

A lot of households have done something similar.

Additionally, not all households bought their first house in their 20s - plenty of households did so in their 30s and 40s.

> They could buy a house when you could easily get one for <10 years of salary almost anywhere

And during that era, you had double digit interest rates [0]

[0] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1338105/volcker-shock-in...

Let's not assume that 6 figure salary is close to 999,999. In reality it's closer to 100,001.

And when you factor in inflation and increased housing cost the comparison starts to differ greatly.

Millennials have it pretty tough.

Everything that can be done is being done to ensure that white-collar labor transitions from skilled workers to low-cost fungible operators of AI. Even if no further jobs are lost it will be a massive hit to the average salary.

I was equally stunt, but get this : Visa wants to know how much people are going to spend using their services. This is not a sound socio-economic analysis of the wealth transfer. I think overall few people read this type of report.

Instead, it gives insight on a phenomenon that is expected to be an "event". They show that it's going to be gradual, that it already started. Maybe it is a way to inform potential investors in Visa ? Maybe it is a report intended for the business side customers (i.e. commerces) ? I don't know.

Plus, it gives an interesting insight on how the "_real_" economy is still a topic of research where every discourse seem to be on financial performances. I found it interesting after having a repulsed reaction to what I considered a grossly irrelevant account of socio-economic dynamics of the so called "great wealth transfer" (horrible name), like you.

They also hold disproportionate wealth. It is absurd to arbitrarily exclude them.